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The New Enemies of Evolutionary Science

Note: The following report by J. Philippe Rushton was
originally published in Liberty, March, 1998, Vol. II, No. 4, pp. 31-35)

The decencies and pieties of the age are at war with the pursuit of truth.

On January 19, 1989, in the Sausalito Room of the San Francisco Hilton
Hotel, my life changed forever. I stood before a lectern speaking to a
symposium of scientists belonging to the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS). The title of the brief paper I proceeded to
present to the meeting was "Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With
Reference to Oriental-White-Black Differences)."

I reviewed the international literature recently published in academic
peer-reviewed journals. I summarized data about traits like brain size,
temperament, speed of maturation, family structure, and reproductive
variables. I tentatively concluded, roughly speaking, that East Asians, on
average, were slower to mature, less fertile, less sexually active, with
larger brains and higher IQ scores than Africans, who tended to the opposite
in each of these areas. Whites, I found, fell between the other two groups.

I further contended that this orderly tri-level hierarchy of races in
average tendency had its roots not only in economic, cultural, familial, and
other environmental forces but also, to a far greater extent than mainstream
social science would suggest, in ancient, gene-mediated evolutionary ones.
Heredity, or nature - to use the term popularized by Francis Galton, Charles
Darwin's younger cousin - was every bit as important as environment or
nurture, often more so. To account for the racial pattern in brain size and
the other "life-history variables," I proposed a gene-based life-history
theory familiar to evolutionary biologists as the r-K scale of reproductive
strategy. At one end of this scale are r strategies, which emphasize high
reproductive rates, and, at the other K-strategies, which emphasize high
levels of parental investment. This scale is generally used to compare the
life histories of widely disparate species but I used it to describe the
immensely smaller variations within the human species. I hypothesized that
Mongoloid people are, on average, more K-selected than Caucasoids, who in turn
are more K-selected than Negroids.

I also mapped this theory onto human evolution. Molecular genetic evidence
shows that modern humans evolved in Africa sometime after 200,000 years ago,
with an African/non-African split occurring about 110,000 years ago, and a
Mongoloid/Caucasoid split about 41,000 years ago. The farther north the
populations migrated, "out of Africa," the more they encountered the
cognitively demanding problems of gathering and storing food, gaining shelter,
making clothes, and raising children successfully during prolonged winters. As
these populations evolved into present-day Europeans and East Asians, they did
so by shifting toward larger brains, slower rates of maturation, and lower
levels of sex hormone with concomitant reductions in sexual potency and
aggression and increases in family stability and longevity.

I did not claim to have established the truth of these hypotheses. They may
never by established in their entirety. But if they, or any part of them, or
even any parallel hypotheses were eventually confirmed, we would have an
explanation of why the measured traits are statistically distributed among
racial groups in the distinct patterns evident in the data I had examined. The
theories provided testable hypotheses and consequently complied with two
fundamental goals of any science: the search to provide causal explanations of
phenomena, and the search to unify separate fields of thought. These powerful
incentives pulled me forward.

I emphasized two caveats in my presentation before the AAAS. First, because
there is enormous variability within each population and because the
population distributions overlap, it is always problematic to generalize from
a group average to any particular individual. Secondly, because genetic
efforts are necessarily mediated by neurohormonal and psychosocial mechanisms,
many opportunities exist for intervention and the alleviation of suffering. My
hypothesis so stunned AAAS organizers that they quickly called a press
conference to publicly dissociate themselves from my remarks. At the press
conference, the president of the AAAS, Dr. Walter Massey, vice-president for
research at the University of Chicago, told reporters that my credentials as a
psychologist were good and that scholars participating in the conference were
free to draw any conclusions they choose. Massey affirmed that the AAAS would
never consider muzzling any scholar because the free expression of views was
the essence of academic discussion. He went on to say that I had made "quite a
leap of faith from the data to the conclusions" and that he found the paper
"personally disturbing" and its conclusions "highly suspect." The scene was
eerily reminiscent of the closing sequence of the film Rosemary's Baby with
the media setting up to take pictures of the newborn devil, cloven hoofs and
slit eyes, ready to raise hell on earth. I was about to become an academic
pariah. By the time I returned from the conference to my home in London,
Ontario, and my job as professor of psychology at the University of Western
Ontario, the uproar was in full swing. "Canadian Professor Provokes Uproar
With Racial Theories," proclaimed Canada's national newspaper, the venerable
Globe and Mail. "Theory Racist: Prof Has Scholars Boiling," declared the
influential Toronto Star. "UWO Professor Denies Study Was Racist," trumpeted
the local London Free Press. Newspapers took my views to hostile social
activist groups and got their predictably hostile opinion. They said I should
be fired for promoting hatred. The press then took this idea to the president
of the university who upheld the principle of academic freedom. The ongoing
conflict was serialized for weeks. Student activist groups soon entered the
fray, demanding that I meet with them in a public forum.

TV coverage of my theories juxtaposed photos of me with footage of Nazi
storm troops. Editing and voiceovers removed any mention of my qualification
that the race differences I had identified were often quite small and could
not be generalized to individuals and didn't mention that like any decent
human being I abhor Nazi racial policies. Newspapers caricatured me as wearing
a Ku Klux Klan hood or talking on the telephone to a delighted Adolf Hitler.
The Toronto Star began a campaign to get me fired from my position, chastising
my university and stating "This protection of a charlatan on grounds of
academic freedom is preposterous." Later, the same paper linked me to the
Holocaust saying, "[Thus] there emerged the perverted 'master race' psychology
of the 20th century, and the horror of the Holocaust. Oddly, the discredited
theories of eugenic racism still are heard, most recently from an academic at
an Ontario university." I had no choice but to hire a prestigious law firm and
issue notices under the Libel and Slander Act against the newspaper. This
brought the media campaign against me to a halt.

Hate Crime Laws

In the U.S. there is a First Amendment to protect the right of every
citizen to free speech and there is not much the government can do to silence
unpopular ideas. In Canada and many Western European countries, however, there
are laws against free speech, ostensibly enacted to inhibit "hate" and the
spreading of "false news."

Two weeks after my AAAS presentation, the premier of Ontario denounced my
theories. My work was "highly questionable and destructive" and "morally
offensive to the way Ontario thinks," he said. It "destroys the kind of work
we are trying to do, to bring together a society based on equality of
opportunity." The premier told reporters he had telephoned the university
president and found him in a dilemma about how to handle the case. The premier
said that he understood and supported the concept of academic freedom, but in
this particular case dismissal should occur "to send a signal" to society that
such views are "highly offensive."

When the university failed to fire me, the premier asked the Ontario
Provincial Police to investigate whether I had violated the federal Criminal
Code of Canada, Chapter 46, Section 319, Paragraph 2, which specifies:
"Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than private conversation,
willfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty of an
indictable offense and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two
years."

The police questioned my colleagues and members of the administration and
professors at other universities, demanded tapes of media interviews, and sent
a questionnaire to my attorney to which I was obliged to reply in detail.
(There's no Fifth Amendment in Canada either). After harassing me and dragging
my name through the dirt for six months, the Attorney General of Ontario
declined to prosectue me and dismissed my research as "loony, but not
criminal."

This did not halt the legal action. Eighteen students, including seven
Black students, lodged a formal complaint against me to the Ontario Human
Rights Commission claiming that I had violated Sections, 1, 8, and 10 of the
1981 Ontario Human Rights Code guaranteeing equality of treatment to all
citizens of the province. In particular, I was charged with "infecting the
learning environment with academic racism." As remedy, the complainants
requested that my employment at the university be terminated and that an order
be made requiring the university to "examine its curriculum so as to eliminate
academic racism." I was outraged. A more flagrant attack on the right to
freedom of expression was difficult to imagine in a supposedly free country.
"Human rights" tribunals were becoming a menace - a direct threat to the very
human rights and fundamental freedoms they were supposed to protect. The
Ontario Human Rights Commission could no more change the truth about human
races than could the Christian Inquistion about the solar system or the KGB
about the genetics of wheat. I found it difficult to accept the increasingly
obvious fact that in the post-Soviet world, an academic was freer to say what
he believed about some things in Russia, than in Canada.

Four long years after the complaint was lodged, the Ontario Human Rights
Commission abandoned its case against me claiming it could no longer find the
complainants to testify.

Events at the University

In its relations with the outside world the university administration stood
firmly for academic freedom. The president gave a press conference to state
categorically that there would be no investigation of me, that I would not be
suspended, and that I was free to pursue any line of research I chose.

Behind the scenes, however, I became the target of a witch hunt by some of
the administrators. Dismayingly, my dean, a physical anthropologist, publicly
declared that I had lost my scientific credibility and spearheaded an attack
on me in the newspapers. She issued a series of preemptive statements making
plain her negative opinion of me and my work. "What evidence is there for this
ranked ordering of the evolution of the human races?" she wrote. "None."
Claiming that her views represented only her academic opinion she emphasized
that she was not speaking in any administrative capacity. Her letter was
nonetheless widely interpreted in the media as a refutation by my "boss."
Henceforth, in order to support me, a person would now have to go up against
the dean in addition to prevailing opinion. Next, the chair of my department
gave me an annual performance rating of "unsatisfactory" citing my
"insensitivity." This was a remarkable turnaround because it occurred for the
same year in which I had been made a Fellow of the prestigious John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation. My previous twelve years of annual ratings had been
"good" or "excellent." Indeed, my earlier non-controversial work had made me
on of the most cited scholars in my university.

Because unsatisfactory ratings can lead to dismissal, even for a tenured
professor like me, I contested the rating through various levels of grievance,
wasting an enormous amount of time and emotional energy. The proceedings that
followed were Kafkaesque, terrifying when they weren't simply funny. For
example, the grievance procedures required that I first appeal the Chairman's
negative assessment to the Dean. The Dean had already spoken out against me,
so I asked the Dean to recuse herself from hearing the case. She refused. So I
had to appear before her.

At my hearing, the Dean's folded arms and glowers of fury made her decision
obvious, and six weeks later, she upheld the Department Chair's decision. In a
seven-page letter justifying her decision, she cast aspersions at my
"sensitivity," and my sense of "responsibility," and questioned whether ther
were, in fact, "any" papers that had ever been published that had supported my
perspective other than those I had written myself.

I decided on a more drastic defense. I wrote to colleagues around the world
and received over 50 strong letters of support, many endorsing the evidence I
had presented. When the Dean found out about this she went absolutely
ballistic, on one occasion screaming and spitting at me in fury.

I eventually won my appeal against the Dean and the Chair and two separate
grievance committeess chastised them for their actions against me. My annual
performance ratings are back to receiving grades of "good" and "excellent."
Some radical and Black students mobilized and held rallies, even bringing in a
member of the African National Congress to denounce me. In one demonstration,
a mob of 40 people stormed through the psychology department, banging on walls
and doors, bellowing slogans through bull horns, drawing swastikas on the
walls, and writing on my door "Racist Pig Live Here."

The administration responded by barring me from the classroom and ordering
me to lecture by videotape on the pretext that they could not protect me from
the lawlessness of students. Again I launched formal grievances. After a term
of enforced teaching by videotape, I won the right to resume teaching in
person, though then I was required to run a gauntlet of demonstrators shouting
protests and threats. Only after several forced cancellations of my classes
did the administration warn the demonstrators that further action would lead
to suspension and legal action. That brought the protests to a halt.

De Facto Censorship and the Corruption of Scholarship

As a graduate student at the London School of Economics and Political
Science in 1973, I witnessed a physical assault on Hans Eysenck, who was
studying the biological basis of intelligence and had recently published his
book Race, Intelligence, and Education (1971). The slogan of that day was
"Fascists Have No Right To Speak," and Eysenck became a target for attack. No
legal charges were brought for the widely witnesses assault because another
popular slogan of the 1960's , for those who approved the message but
disapproved the tactic, was "There are no Enemies on the Left." Stories of
harassment and intimidation could be told by many others who have had the
temerity to research topics that touch on the genetic or distributional basis
of race differences.

Today, many campus radicals from the 1960's are the tenured radicals of the
1990's. They have become the chairs of departments, the deans, and the
chancellors of the universities: senior political administrators in Congress
and Houses of Parliament, and even the presidents and prime mimisters of
countries. The 1960's mentality of peace, love, and above all, equality, now
constitutes the intellectual dogma of the Western academic world. There are
laws to prohibit platforms for those denounced as "fascists" and others deemed
to be not politically correct.

In his book, Kindly Inquisitors, Jonathan Rauch showed that even in the
U.S. with the First Amendment in place, many colleges and universities have
set up "anti-harassment" rules prohibiting - and establishing punishments for
- "speech or other expression" that is intended to "insult or stigmatize an
individual or a small number of individuals in the basis of their sex, race,
color, hankicap, religion, sexual orientation or national and ethnic origin."
(This is quoted from Stanford's policy, and is more or less typical.) One case
at the University of Michigan became well known because it led a federal court
to strike down the rule in question. A student claimed, in a classroom
discussion, that he thought homosexuality was a disease treatable with
therapy. He was formally disciplined by the university for violating the
school's policy and victimizing people on the basis of sexual orientation.

In Canada and Western Europe, governments can and do prohibit speech on
topics they consider obnoxious. In Denmark, a woman wrote a letter to a
newspaper calling national domestic partner laws "ungodly" and homosexuality
"the ugliest kind of adultery." She and the editor who published her letter
were targeted for prosectution. In Great Britain, the Race Relations Act
forbids speech that expresses racial hatred, "not only when it is likely to
lead to violence, but generally, on the grounds that members of the minority
races should be protected from racial insults." In some parts of the world you
can be jailed, exiled, or even executed for expressing forbidden opinions.

Irrespective of religious background, or political affiliation, virtually
all American intellectuals adhere to what has been called 'one-party science.'
For example, only politically correct hypotheses centering on cultural
disadvantage are postulated to explain the differential representation of
minorities in science. Analyses of aptitude test scores and behavioral
genetics are taboo. Cheap moralizing is so fierce that most people respect the
taboo. This intellectual cowardice only encourages viscious attacks by
activist groups on those who are engaged in legitimate scientific research
showing that there is a genetic basis underlying individual and group
differences.

The high-placed pervasiveness of the egalitarian orthodoxy is scary. Even
more frightening than what happened to me is the experience of Christopher
Brand, professor of psychology at Edinburgh University. On February 29, 1996,
Brand's book on intelligence, The g Factor, was published in the United
Kingdom by the British subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. On April 14,
newspaper reports of interviews with him began to appear saying that he
thought black people had a lower IQ than did whites and that these were
probably partly genetic. On April 17, Wiley's company in New York denounced
Brand's views as "repellent" and withdrew the book from bookstores. A blizzard
of "refutations" of Brand appeared in the U.K. media under outraged headlines.
Protests from members of Parliament, student boycotts of his lectures, and
calls for his resignation by faculty at the University of Edinburgh all
predictably ensued. Brand's refusal to be silenced and his defense of free
speech led him to be fired (on August 8, 1997) for bringing his university
into disrepute. There but for the grace God, go I. In 1995, my monograph Race,
Evolution, and Behavior was published by Transaction Publishers. Subsequently,
the book was translated into Japanese (1996) and released as a softcover
edition (1997) with an Afterword updating the science since the hardback went
to press.

The book garnered a lead review in the New York Times Book Review (October
16, 1994) where Malcolm Browne, the Times science writer, discussed it along
with Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve and Seymour
Itzkoff's The Decline of Intelligence in America. Browne concluded his
analysis with the statement that "the government or society that persists in
sweeping this topic under the rug will do so at its peril." Dozens of other
journals, including the National Review, Nature,andThe Nation, also reviewed
it.

Its publication by an important academic press touched off a new round of
hysteria. A lurid article screaming "Professors of HATE" (in five-inch
letters!) appeared in Rolling Stone magazine (October 20, 1994). Taking up the
entire next page was a photograph of my face, hideously darkened, twisted into
a ghoulish image, and superimposed on a Gothic university tower. In another
long propaganda piece entitled "The Mentality Bunker" which appeared in
Gentleman's Quarterly (November 1994), I was misrepresented as an outmoded
eugenicist and pseudoscientific racist. A photograph of me was published in
brown tint reminiscent of vintage photos from the Hitler era.

Incredibly, Canada Customs seized and witheld copies of one shipment of the
book for nine months while they tried to decide whether to condemn the book as
"hate literature" and ban it from entering Canada. The fact that an academic
book was even the subject of an investigation stunned my publisher: "I've
never heard of such a thing," said Mary Curtis, Chairman of the Board of
Transaction. "This is not supposed to happen in Canada. The last time the
company had trouble shipping scholarly works was in the mid-1980's, when some
books shipped to the Moscow Fair didn't make it."

Michel Cléroux, a spokesman for Canada Customs, said Customs were just
following orders by investigating possible hate propaganda. A departmental
policy prohibiting hate propaganda includes this definition: "Goods alleging
that an identifiable group is racially inferior and/or weakens other segments
of society to the detriment of society as a whole." After an "investigation"
lasting nine months, Canada Customs relented.

Harassment continued at another meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. The AAAS routinely allows the militantly disruptive
International Committee Against Racism (INCAR) and Progressive Labor Party
(PLP) to have official "Exhibitor" status, along with a booth, at its annual
meeting. At the February 1996 meeting in Baltimore, INCAR and PLP festooned
their booth with posters of Karl Marx and signs taking credit for interfering
with the University of Maryland conference on "Genes and Crime" in September
1995. At the AAAS meeting, INCAR targeted my poster presenting a review of the
literature on brain size and cognitive ability. When INCAR encountered me the
day before the poster presentation, they yelled so many death threats that the
AAAS called the Baltimore police, who dispatched an armed officer to stand by
the presentation. Despite the guard, INCAR continued to utter threats. One
demonstrator took photographs of me saying they were for a "Wanted: Dead or
Alive" poster. "You won't be living much longer," he said. Incredibly, instead
of cancelling the Exhibitor Status of organizations that threaten violencee,
the program director of the AAAS's annual meeting said, in an interview
published in The Scientist (March 4, 1996), that AAAS would tighten up the
screening process to make it more difficult for presentations like mine to get
on the program! As Charles Murray has observed in the aftermath to The Bell
Curve, social science is corrupt on the topic of race. Yet, the genetic
hypothesis for the pervasiveness of the three-way racial pattern across so
many traits, and which calls into question simple explanations based only on
social factors like discrimination and poverty, needs to be discussed.

In his commencement address to the graduating class of 1997 at the
University of California (San Diego), U.S. President Bill Clinton called for a
new dialogue on race and for "deepening our understanding of human nature and
human differences." But apparently there are some aspects of human nature and
human differences he'd rather leave unexplored.

I've learned a great deal since that day in 1989 when I stood before that
meeting of scientists and presented a summary of my research, thereby making
myself the target of harassment by the politically correct and the object of
intimidation by the government of Canada. Despite the viscious campaign
against investigation of the possible genetic basis of group differences, my
interest never wavered. Work on other topics seemed shallow by comparison.
Spurred by attacks and aided by colleagues, I have sought out more definitive
tests of the genetic hypothesis and continue to publish my research.

I've also learned how important freedom of inquiry is to science, which
must always remain to pursue truth without regard for where that pursuit
leads. I've learned to treasure such remnants of freedom of speech as I enjoy
as a citizen of Canada, and remain more committed than ever to the search for
truth. As Benjamin Franklin observed more than two centuries ago, "Without
freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as
public liberty, without freedom of speech."

J. Philippe Rushton

Department of Psychology University of Western Ontario London, Ontario N6A
5C2